Backup exec 10D Job time length Varies by Hours

[ipcc]

I have a customer who has a hp dl380 with a external enclosure, and two Ultrium Drives one LTO3 400-800 and one LTO4 800-1.6tb

The problem we are having is time it takes to backup varies from around 11hours to 16hours just for a couple of Gig say 499 to 501 GB.

does not to seem to be any pattern to when it decides to go on a go-slow. so this rules out a regular task.

would welcome suggestions

ver 10.1 rev 5629

[ipcc]

My Customer, Is increasingly getting frustrated with the backup exec, even the transfer rate has changed from 880 to 500 mb per minuite,  The throughput has decreased.

Have any of you seen this before.

[Nico_Buma]

I think it would be a bad tape (old) or an uncleaned drive.

And are the 400GB-800GB tapes slower than the 800GB-1.6TB tapes?

[ipcc]

Drives have been cleaned when required, and tapes have been replaced we are backing up on the 400-800

the problem is it is roughly the same amount of data but the backup can take anything from 11 Hours to 16 Hours.  I could understand if we were gaining vast amounts of data, then yes ,but we are not.

[ipcc]

This is now very urgent as the backup has gone to over 17 Hours, and we haven't got any closer to a resolve.

[Danielson]

We had slow tape times and found there were a few things to do to fix the issue:

1) Ensure the SCSI card that the tape drive is using is plugged into the PCI slot in the motherboard with the fasted bus speed (check the motherboard documentation to be sure)

2) Don't connect your tape drives to the SCSI raid controller card (have a dedicated card)

3) In Backup Exec, check devices, right click on the LTO drive, properties-->configuration tab.  Ensure that the Block Size and Buffer size are both the maximum available. (in our case it was 64K, 1024K)

4) After experimentation, we actually found that the Dell tape driver (we're using an ultrium LTO2) worked faster than the Backup Exec driver.  You may try uninstalling the BE drivers completely and then installing the manufacturer's tape driver.  If you get some SCSI timeout errors in the application log, you can ignore them unless the job fails.

5) Also use the manufacturer's driver for the SCSI card

6) If you're backing up over a network, hook up your server to a Gigabit switch and configure the network cards and switch to do LAG teaming (doubles bandwidth)

Good luck!  Dan